Millions of Faxes (ft. Kesava Dinakaran)

So if you were to work with an organization, what are some measurable changes that they might expect?

Lumini helps large health systems move their operational overload and operational manual workflows to computers and AI. I encourage, I guess, everybody at Lumini to be unbelievably sort of vulnerable. It's not obviously common in a professional workplace, but it helps everybody see the person as a whole human being. And that just builds an unbelievable amount of trust, and trust builds companies.

Welcome to Digital Voices, where healthcare and life science leaders explore the real work behind transformation. This podcast is about people, leadership, and the conversations that move healthcare forward. Now your host, Ed Marx.

Welcome to another edition of Digital Voices, another awesome guest. This is such a treat for me as much as it is for you, my audience, because I'm always learning and love to meet these incredible leaders that are really doing some disruptive things in the industry that we need so bad. And so today I have the CEO from Luminai, and it's Keshav. So Keshav, welcome to Digital Voices.

Thank you so much for having me, Ed. Very, very excited to be here.

This will be a lot of fun because what you're doing is, I think, something that's terribly needed in healthcare. And we haven't had too much disruption. We need a lot more. And the technology that you're bringing to bear, I think, is one of those things that's really going to bring big changes about. So, but before we get there, we met just recently in the past year and we were both at the same conference and I actually recognized you. I told you this. I I recognized you from, uh, from Vibe, and I recognized like, wow, that guy has great hair. And, uh, and then also I was in this conference and you walked in. I was like, oh my gosh, I recognize that. I recognize him. So I came up and introduced myself to you. And from there we just became, uh, friends. And then I was like, man, I just want to have you on our podcast. Um, so I know you've listened to some before, you know, the very most important question we ask, as much as we're into healthcare disruption, is what songs are on your playlist? What kind of music do you like to listen to?

You know, I'm extremely basic. I have not very much sophisticated taste, to be very honest. Most of my music, funnily enough, is some combination of pop songs that are translated to violin mixes. So actually at my wedding, we took DJ Goddess Falling and changed it into a violin version. And then that was the first dance. And so it's a way for me to sort of, while I'm working, not be distracted by the lyrics, but still enjoy pop. And so most of what I listen to, funnily enough, is all pop, all the way from Taylor Swift, to Indian pop music.

Yeah, that's cool. What about life message or mantra? Are there words that kind of guide you or words that you live by?

The thing that has, I guess, kept me going today and has brought me here in the first place, and in the end of the day, deeply energizes me is at the end of the day, persistence is what is key. And so, you know, at the end of the day, like, it doesn't matter how much you've been punched, it doesn't matter how much success you've had, keeping on, you know, taking one step after another is what will, you know, get you at the end of the day to your pursuit and destiny. And so, yeah, I'm a big, big fan of realizing at the end of the day, like, repeated, consistent, persistent pursuit is what leads to success. leads to success.

Yeah, I like that. And I had the feeling that that theme might reappear later on in our conversation. Shava, tell us about yourself. Like, who are you? What's your story? Tell us about where did you grow up?

Most of my extended family, my grandparents and generations, we were all sort of coconut farmers for several sort of generations. And then my parents moved up to Chennai, which is the city in South India. And so most of my life, I grew up there, and very early on, I got really into solving Rubik's Cubes. I'd sort of seen a friend of mine solve a Rubik's Cube and decided to essentially ask him to teach me. Ended up basically getting extremely obsessed with it for a few reasons. One was the community in Rubik's Cubes are crazy. Actually, I learned Rubik's Cubes on YouTube from one of the co-founders of now OpenAI. Back then he was just a machine learning researcher, and he's a very famous sort of Rubik's Cube teacher. But that's the type of quirky people you end up sort of seeing. And so really wanted to kind of get out of the traditional Indian community, I guess I was part of, and just realized, oh man, the world is so much bigger. And Rubik's Cubes are very interesting, in some ways works, right? Which is like, how at the end of the day, it's really a competition in many ways against yourself in that like how much faster can you solve a Rubik's Cube? And so, ended up basically spending maybe 7 years of my life between the ages of 10 and 17, every single day for more than 7 or 8 hours a day for straight, ended up breaking a bunch of world records, was a captain of the international Rubik's Cube team. So, I got to travel to some parts of the world funded by the Indian government to go solve Rubik's Cubes. And yeah, it sort of is sort of what got me going. Ended up because of that going to this high school actually called the United World College. It's 100 kids from like 80 different countries. The whole mission of the school was to promote peace. I went on a full scholarship. It's a wild group of people because it's 100 kids from these 80 countries. You have kids who are literally refugees. I had someone who ended up separating from his family when he was 10 years old and fled to Turkey from Syria. And crazily enough, the reunion of his family happened in my high school when the school brought his family over from Syria. True, one of my co-years, her grandpa was the president of South Africa. that's sort of the spectrum of people you end up being around. And I guess like only getting 100x more ambitious, I guess, through that experience. And fast forward shortly after, ended up wanting to really live the United World College cycling sort of mission. And so I ended up basically getting on a bike from Turkey to China to promote the United World College mission. And obviously that sort of changed my life pretty dramatically. And there was a foundation here in the US that caught wind of that, right? Mm-hmm. But flew me out here for 10 days and came out of Silicon Valley, and then, yeah, the rest is history.

No, that's super interesting. And yeah, I'll try to remember in the show notes to post a clip. There's a lot of clips of you, I think, solving Rubik's Cube. What was the fastest you've ever done it?

So my average solves were somewhere between 7 and 8 seconds, but the world records I broke, going back to that persistence point, because I guess just naturally I got attracted to it, the world records I broke, and And knock on wood, I still hold them today, is most number of Rubik's Cubes solved in 1 hour. So it's how many can you do in 1 hour? And so it was truly an endurance feat in that sense versus just individual speed solving.

How many Rubik's Cubes was that in 1 hour?

So there were 2 world records. One was most number of Rubik's Cubes solved in 1 hour by an individual, that was me. And then I also sort of captained the Indian national team to break the world record for most number of Rubik's Cubes solved by a country, meaning a group of basically 9 people. So funnily enough, when I did the team event, that individual group was better than when I did it individually, I guess. So it was 305 Rubik's Cubes in 1 hour.

That's amazing. And the Silk Road. Yeah, explain the Silk Road a little bit, because you told us, you know, you started in one country, ended in another, but I mean, that's a huge feat that you did. Tell us a little bit more. That's so interesting.

I had never been on a bike before. Oh, that's genius. And so, you know, I think what had, essentially what had happened was I was graduating from high school and I really, really felt deeply connected to the high school mission. And the school's been around for 60-plus years and I think they've been sort of impacting the world pretty meaningfully. The mission of the school was to promote peace. And there was a friend of mine who was obsessed with this idea of essentially cycling the Silk Road. His mom had told him about how Europe had found Asia and how this road basically was what led to essentially the creation of global trade and how cultures actually first started to interact with each other in a very meaningful way. He had this crazy dream of wanting to do it right after he graduated. And he was telling me about this. And we, you know, he really came up with the idea of wanting to do it. And so, we ended up basically going and raising money from the high school to go pursue this cycling trip. There were 2 things that happened. One was I was incredibly unhealthy and I lived in a, you know, a boarding school. You know, we were doing 3:00 AM ramen. I was super chubby and very unhealthy and realized that like, Hey, if I keep going down this path, there's no going back essentially. And I was definitely walking myself into a spiral that I did not want to show up in. And the second piece, I genuinely thought if I did something so crazy that the American colleges would pay attention. And so I was like, okay, this is sort of two birds, one stone. Let's go do this crazy thing. And so the only bike ride I'd ever done before that was like a 50-miler 2 weekends prior to the trip starting. I did not anticipate how much physical demand it was going to take. Obviously, you know, I was in the gym and I was working out and really trying to get healthy before this trip started, but I didn't quite anticipate how crazy of a physical feat it was going to be. as you'd expect. But I guess going back to the naive persistence is key, really just decided to do it. And yeah, decided to— ended up sort of the whole journey was from Turkey to China. And funnily enough, day 2, I started to feel it. First day, I ran on adrenaline, maybe biked 80, 90 miles, felt amazing, didn't have any sort of, I guess, like trouble. During that ride and went to bed, woke up the next morning and couldn't move anything but my eyes and realized, oh man, what have I signed myself up for? And yeah.

That's an amazing feat for an elite athlete and for you to be able to pick it up as you explain and kind of learned on the way. That's pretty amazing. And what a great experience I'm sure along the way and all the different people you've met and all the different cultures you interacted with. How many flat tires? Did you get any flat tires along the way?

Many, many, many, many, many, many flat tires. Cannot tell you how much I know the mechanics of a bike now. Obviously helpful now as I bike a lot now, but it was the worst part of the trip, to be very honest, because there were times when like we'd have a flat tire, we'd replace the flat tire, we'd have another flat tire, replace the flat tire, and then not have enough enough tires to get fixed. And so, there were points where, no joke, we walked 10+ miles to the closest town to go get it fixed. And so, yeah, it was a little crazy, but I'm here now, so clearly—

No, I mean, amazing, interesting background. Could talk about it forever. So, you go to college. What was your first job? Post-graduation, and then what came after that?

I actually did not go to college. So ended up right out of high school, started to apply to all these colleges. And what ended up happening was there was a high school here in the US, sorry, not a high school. There was the foundation here in the US that caught wind of that cycling trip and flew me out here for 10 days and came out to the US for this program. It was a 10-day program. At the end of the 10 days, fell in love with America, came out to Silicon Valley, and they had known a few people who were donors of the foundation. And so, ended up meeting a bunch of, now actually, funnily enough, some pretty meaningful AI researchers who were at Google at the time, as well as a bunch of other founders and entrepreneurs. And at the end of the 5-day trip, I was like, I need to figure out a way to pay to be here. And I ended up basically after that realizing, okay, like, do I really want to go to college was the question I was asking because I just fell in love with everything that was happening in Silicon Valley. And so decided not to do it. And so my first job, I guess, out of college, without college, out of high school, was founding Luminai.

Oh, wow. So you went, that's just fascinating. How did you get interested in healthcare? Like, how did that all happen? How did it— what's the origin story?

So, you know, I was wandering for a few years, essentially interested in this idea and this research of how do you get machines to control machines? Interestingly enough, the house I lived in produced several billion-dollar companies, including one in healthcare called Ambience. And so, Nikhil and Mike were both my roommates for a while, for over 3 years in fact. And, but really was sort of wandering in this idea of how do you get machines to control machines? How do you essentially remove very, very mundane, boring work from humans? Because I felt at the end of the day that we as humans were becoming slaves to computers instead of actually Computers being the ones that supercharge us. And so, I was really excited about this idea of how do you essentially get rid of all the work that you shouldn't be doing on a computer and letting you actually pursue what we as humans are meant to do, which is think strategically, do creative things, pursue ambitious, aggressive things at scale. And so, I was wandering for a few years and In that same timeframe, had a pretty serious family health event in 2023. And I guess that was the first time as a young person in some ways experiencing what it's like to go through healthcare as a journey. Thankfully, everything was okay in the grand scheme of things after all the amazing sort of support, but just sort of a The journey that I went through and sort of the way it shook our family was so, so meaningful that I was just like, this is something I can completely get obsessed with and think about for a very long time, primarily motivated by the idea of not wanting other people to go through a similar experience. And so, what was then sort of figuring out, okay, I'm interested in this idea of How do you get machines to control machines? And then, the state of healthcare. And, as I started to go deeper and deeper and deeper, I realized no better application of this technology of now what we call LLMs, but back then, basically baseline automation technology in some of the work that is happening across America and the rest of the world. And so, that's sort of how the healthcare being kind of came together. And the creation of Lumenai happened in the first place.

Oh, I love that. So for our audience that might not know, how would you describe Lumenai?

Lumenai helps large health systems move their operational overload and operational manual workflows to computers and AI. That's the most simple sort of definition. You know, maybe the more tactical version is, We believe the 30% of spend, 30 to 40% of spend that is going into these incredibly manual, paper-pushing, very, very operationally intensive jobs can be finally moved to AI systems so that those people can actually go do the work that they were meant to do.

Yeah, as you know, hospitals are really struggling with margins, the revenue, and as you said, it's probably 30, 40%, I would say maybe even higher, opportunity there to really leverage tech, leverage AI to bring about improvements and, say, become much more efficient as an organization. What are some measurable changes? So if you were to work with an organization, a hospital, what are some measurable changes that they might expect?

As you know, we work with your alma mater in Cleveland Clinic, and it might be good to just kind of describe and talk about How this shows up in the real world, which is our belief is historically, if you think about the software paradigm, they were built to solve very verticalized, very specific point problems. And it worked for the previous era of software. But what's happened since then is essentially this creation of hundreds, if not thousands, of point solutions that have been procured by these health systems that the admin overload of actually managing them is worse than the actual ROI and value that they're individually creating. And the reality is like, that was the case because of the software paradigm that we were in prior. With the advent of these models and the advent of AI at the scale we're in today, we have this sort of very special opportunity really, which is to create one fundamental infrastructure where you can basically build a set of agents or workflow automations on that one infrastructure that can very rapidly scale across a variety of different workflows and share context and essentially drive large-scale automation in a way that's never been done or been possible before in the first place. If you think about a real-world use case today, the Cleveland Clinic, for example, receives millions of faxes on a yearly basis. We're in 2026 and faxes is is really the unfortunate reality of how communication happens today. And what Luminai is essentially doing for them, for example, is we've become basically the first line of defense for those type of documents that are coming in. And our agents, what they do are essentially go through these documents, extract, first index them, understand them, triage them, extract the information from them, Be able to actually do risk stratification on them, meaning if these are incredibly urgent, high-critical patients or documents that need to be processed immediately, do that, and then kick off essentially the downstream workflows. And so, in many ways, the work that should be done or were done by these large operational teams that were being outsourced in many ways are now basically done through these AI systems so that the processing of patients is just significantly faster and much more relevant today than ever before. And so, that's sort of the starting point in many ways of what is an example of one use case. But then, if you think about the infrastructure that gets set up, we're integrated into their core systems, and essentially, that becomes the starting point of now across some of our customers. Our most scaled customer has north of 15 use cases that they've deployed on the Unite platform and growing incredibly rapidly. And so really becoming the admin AI platform for these large health systems.

Yeah, that's a great approach, right? It's a platform. So yeah, they might want to attack a single problem, fax machines as an example. And then after, when they have that success, they see the capabilities, they can tackle other issues that are heavily manual and use the same platform. So it's not like you have to bring in 1,000 vendors for 1,000 different problems. You can bring in one platform.

That's, that's, that's exactly, that's exactly right.

Because I often get a little scared that, you know, we've been fighting technical debt, as we call it, for many, many years because we had all these point solutions. And I see many organizations doing that today with AI, a lot of AI point solutions. And it's like, you should really find yourself a partner that's a platform that can help you in a lot of different ways. That's pretty great. How has, you know, we talked about cycling a little bit earlier and resilience and Just being persistent. How has that helped you as a CEO and running a company?

You know, company building is one of the most spiritual experiences that like anybody can essentially go through. It's obviously not for everybody, but I think it should be done by more people than it is today. It's sort of the way to think about it is you get 1,000 punches before you get to, you put your next foot forward. But that next foot forward hopefully is the next step forward to be able to actually pursue this dream and this vision for changing the world. And if you think about cycling, especially when you're biking for a very, very, very long time, your body initially, and I'm sure you know this better than anybody else, Ed, but The first 20, 30 miles are a slog in some ways, but then your body eventually gets used to it and then can do maybe 3, 4x the mileage than before. And that's really how company building is, is that like getting it off the ground is incredibly painful, but if you can persist through it, the magic that gets created from that is one of the most spiritual experiences that you can go through. And it's been unbelievably rewarding in many ways to be a biker and a founder at the same time. Many of my big strategic decisions, many of the big calls I've made have happened on the bike in that, like, it shouldn't be surprising to you, but like the Sunday bike ride is almost this like sacred activity that I do, right? And it's sort of the 4 to 5 hours of just like alone time where it's almost processing all the events of the week. And really shaping up to show up on Sunday afternoon to the office or Monday morning with this level of clarity of what needs to get done to be successful for the rest of the week, but then obviously the long-term company.

Yeah, it's always great. I always find that the best leaders are typically well-rounded. They have other things going on. What about Rubik's Cubes? Do you still play with the Rubik's Cubes?

I think Rubik's Cubes are like my meditation. Um, so, uh, you know, I, uh, I say this with sincerity in that I'm probably still doing a couple hundred solves a week, which is, you know, not that much time in the grand scheme of things, probably somewhere between 30 and 60 minutes of solving on a weekly basis. But it's almost like a meditative experience for me.

I have to believe that there's, uh, something to, obviously the physical exercise, the spirituality you referenced, the music. Doing the Rubik's Cube is doing something for our neurons and our brains. And I think it helps lead to creativity. So people always ask, like, how do you become creative? Well, you got to do a bunch of different things. What would you say, let's maybe we'll end with this on leadership. What are one or two skills in addition to the ones we talked about, you know, persistence, resilience, that you would recommend people sort of hone in on if they want to be doing something amazing like you are with Luminai? Like, what are one or two things that have really helped you be successful?

You know, I really try to wear my heart on my sleeve. And what that really means in some ways is I'm unbelievably vulnerable very early in the conversation because I've just realized at the end of the day, like, you know, people do business with people and the more sort of honest and more direct and more open you are, the better the outcomes have always been. in the grand scheme of things. And so I encourage, I guess, everybody at Luminai to be unbelievably sort of vulnerable. It's sort of a new practice in some ways for people who show up to Luminai because it's not obviously common in a professional workplace, but it helps everybody see the person as a whole human being. And that just builds an unbelievable amount of trust and trust builds companies. It sort of, I think a big, big part is You know, show up with vulnerability and openness. And that's sort of what I feel, you know, has led me to deeply connect with people very quickly and gets people to be more supportive than they would traditionally.

Yeah, that is a huge lesson I wish more leaders have comprehended, you know, because it is true. It's okay to be vulnerable and be human because you do You are authentic. As you said, trust builds companies. That was beautifully stated. So many great quotes. We covered so much in a very short time. We talked a lot about your growing up, but we didn't even get into the coconut farming. That would be super interesting as well. Silk Road, just doing big, hairy, bodacious things. The whole Rubik's Cube. It's just super fascinating, all the different things. Talked a lot about music, but ultimately, and I do think this is what helped create you and your mind and your creativity. And then you're already there having all these ideas. Then there's this health situation that happens in your family that kind of serves as a focus point. Like, wow, we can really leverage machines helping machines in healthcare. And sure enough, as you uncovered, 30%, 40% waste. And I think we're being conservative again, 30%, 40% waste. And you are bringing this platform to bear, already some great early success. And I think the world is ready for this level of transformation in healthcare. So, I love the fact that there's leaders like you leading companies doing the things that you're doing. What did I miss, or is there anything you want to double down on? I'll give you the last word.

I guess, like, tremendously grateful for, you know, you sharing that in some ways, but also, I genuinely don't feel like, you know, Luminai has remotely accomplished what it actually is ready to do and wants to do. And that's coming from a place of humility of how much needs to happen to dramatically change how healthcare is run. And also so that the patients going through the experience that they're going through have a dramatically different and much more positive interaction with how healthcare in America and the rest of the world runs. And yeah, I genuinely feel like it's not even, it's still day one. And that's why it feels like a multi-decade mission. If I have the good health, I'm energized by wanting to run this till the day I die. And so that's sort of the pursuit. I'm a huge fan of people like Nikhil Ferreiro, who actually founded Ferrier Rusher, huge fan of Todd Graves who founded Raising Cane's, huge fan of Jensen who obviously founded NVIDIA. And sort of the whole reason behind all this and these people I'm mentioning is because they're on their sort of life mission companies.

Yeah.

And their obsession over many, many decades of work to dramatically change the industries they're in and create a very different experience to the people who interact with their With their products and services and what they have done so far, that's the type of thing that Luminary is going to be and will be. And that's the pursuit I'm personally on, which is, hey, the job's never finished in this game because we still have healthcare issues. And ideally, with the advent of AI and with the sort of incredible healthcare system at the end of the day that that does exist in many ways because the people who are saving lives every day are unbelievably special. The sort of marrying of those 2 hopefully will lead to a beautiful change in the world.

Yeah, I believe the same thing. The intersection of tech and clinical transforms the world. So thank you so much for being our guest. So fascinating. I wish we had more time. We'll have you back and we'll check back in on how you're doing.

Thank you, Ed.

Thank you for listening to Digital Voices. We hope today's conversation sparked ideas, reflection, and connection. Subscribe on YouTube, Apple, and Spotify Podcasts so you don't miss an episode.